The lesson plan was intended to teach students in middle
school about the grievances of the American colonists and why they wanted to
declare their independence from Britain. The activity the lesson plan designs
incorporates a large amount of cooperative learning. The students are broken up
into different groups and have to work together to come up with their own grievances
based upon a proclamation that is read aloud. When the students have completed
the activity, they have to continue collaborating together and read about the
significance of why the colonists wanted their independence in their textbook. All
in all, this lesson plan is designed to get students to work together to learn
about the colonist’s grievances and try to compare and contrast them to their
own grievances they made during the class activity.

When viewing the lesson plan, Jean Piaget’s formal
operational stage can be seen. The plan was designed for students at the middle
school level, which is the intended age of Piaget’s formal operational stage. According
to this stage, students are able to move from concrete thinking to more of an
abstract and hypothetical thinking. In the lesson plan, students have to think
in a hypothetical way. They have to think about how different their
surroundings would be, how their lifestyles would be affected, and how their
individual freedoms may be skewed if the proclamation that was read to them was
implemented in today. As well, the lesson plan explains how students have to
write grievances with their group regarding their opinions on the proclamation.
This can be seen as providing students with the continuity to think more
abstractly because they are trying to situate themselves in a world where
democracy is nonexistent. Therefore, they are engaging in abstract thought
because they have to think of a world outside their own.

Besides the four stages Piaget
believed each child goes through sequentially, he also believed that peer
interactions were important to cognitive development. Another cognitive theorist, Vygotsky, also believed in the importance of cooperative
learning. He greatly believed that by children working together, it could help
them construct meaning and draw a better understanding of the world around them.
Thus, these two theorists believed that learning is constructive and
interacting with others can help further students’ learning. This lesson plan
involves a beneficial activity that keeps all the students engaged within the
classroom. Students are broken up into different groups where they are able to
work together to create their own grievances and read about why the colonists
declared their independence. Additionally, the teacher is not lecturing. Rather,
she is allowing the students to collaborate with one another to further their
learning and understanding regarding the American Revolution.

In the activity, the
students are being both “minds-on” and “hands-on.” The students are being
minds-on because they are trying to picture a life where monarchy reigns. This can
help them successfully create and give significant grievances to the royal
court in regards to the proclamation. The students are also being minds-on
because they have to collaborate with one another to discover how their
grievances relate to those of the American colonists. As for being hands on,
the students have to work together to create, write, and present their
grievances to the royal court of the classroom.

Another example on how students are being hands-on in the
activity is through role-playing. They are placing themselves in either the
position of the American colonists or the position of the royal court. This is
meant for them to learn the different feelings of certain individuals during
the time era and have them develop an understanding of why the war for
independence happened. The lesson plan explains how students have to choose a
card that indicates what group they are supposed to be in for the activity. This
implies that the activity that the students will be engaging in is
role-playing. The students are able to know what character they have to transform
themselves into so they can modify their mindset to fit to that group they are
intended to be in for the activity. Role-play is something beneficial to
incorporate within lesson plans because it can help keep students engaged
within the classroom. In this activity,
the students are staying engaged when they represent their group’s grievances
to the royal court as well as when they are reading about the colonists in
their textbook. Additionally, role-playing can help students think in a
different manner. It can help strengthen their skills of thinking outside the
box. For this activity, the students are thinking outside the box because they
have to situate themselves where the governmental system in America is a not
democratic, what it would be like living under imperialistic rule and how their
lives would be extremely altered.

Role Playing is also useful to students because it can
help them move information that they learned from their short-term memory into
their long-term memory. This process is known as information processing. One
way students can transfer newly learned information to their long-term memory
is through elaborative rehearsal. They can attach associations with the
material that is being learned, or discovered, and organize it to fit into
their existing knowledge. In the lesson plan’s activity, the students have to
create their own grievances, based off the proclamation that is read aloud to
them. They have to associate what is stated in the proclamation to their own
grievances they created with their group. Besides the grievances, they can
further draw associations with how the proclamation violates their individual
freedoms. Attaching associations can also help further a students’
understanding on why the colonists wanted their independence. They can link
what they gained from their experience with the activity and their textbook
reading to the real grievances the American colonists had. Thus, this can help
better their understanding of the material because they are able to link
information together. Correlating information helps keep it organized and
easier to retrieve out of memory. As well, this is what the brain likes, and
therefore, by being able to intertwine pieces of information together, it can
help an individual move information into their long-term memory and improve
retrieval.

Besides drawing upon associations, another example of
elaborative rehearsal that can be seen within the lesson plan is organization.
Organization is useful because it keeps information in the brain clear and
understandable. By being organized, the brain can better link new information
to existing schemas, it can better recall, and it can more successfully transfer
information into long-term memory. Information that is moved into long-term
memory is placed into a network model, which is where information in the memory
is organized into a network of schemas. Through elaborative rehearsal, students
can organize newly learned information and relate it to their previous
knowledge, or existing network of schemas. For example, the students engaging
in this activity may already have some previous knowledge on the American
Revolution. This previous knowledge they may have is set up into a network of
schemas in their long-term memory. When they participate in the lesson plan’s
activity, they can further expand their existing knowledge of the Revolution.
The students are being able to learn and discover how their grievances, experiences,
and what they read in their textbook relates to their existing knowledge of the
war. Thus, by making connections to their existing knowledge that is set up
into a network in their long-term memory, they are expanding their network of
schemas. As well, by making connections to old information, the brain is more
likely to be able to maintain, recall, and retrieve the new information.

Another concept that can be related to this lesson plan
is the constructivist theory, or how students should try to individually
discover and transform complex information.In the activity, the students have to listen to what is being read from
the proclamation, discover how it is taking away their freedoms and transform
their feelings, or opinions, into grievances.Though the activity is designed to have the students work in a group,
they can still create their own individual opinion they can share with their
group members. It is always beneficial to get other perspectives because it
helps lessen biasness. Also, when the students have to read about the
grievances of the colonists in their textbook, they are discovering and
transforming complex information. As said previously, they are working together
but each student can gain a different perspective on what they are reading.
They can individually discover the colonist’s grievances and try to transform
their own grievances to see if they compare to those of the colonists.

A negative aspect of the lesson plan is how it tries to initiate
inductive learning but does not. The plan sets up the teacher to be involved
within the activity. Their role is to be queen, or king. The lesson plan
explains how having the teacher be the head of the activity avoids
“arbitration.” However, the plan does not fully dictate whether or not the
teacher fully participates or if they leave the activity up to the students.
Because the plan does not provide detail on what the teacher’s exact role is,
teachers who do implement this activity within their classrooms can become more
involved than necessary. This then would lead to deductive learning. Instead of
the students discovering the answers or principles of the activity, the
teachers would simply be giving it to them. A way this activity can
successfully dictate inductive learning and avoid too much teacher involvement is
if the teacher was not the hierarchical leader. They could put all their
student’s names in a hat and just draw one name. This would be able to give all
students a chance to be the leader. The teacher can still watch and monitor the
lesson. However, they would be able to provide their students with more
autonomy to transform the classroom to best suit the activity, create their grievances,
and discover the truth behind the grievances of the American colonists.

The last negative aspect that can be seen when viewing
the lesson plan is its objective. It is quite vague, and the word “understand”
is used to describe what the students will be able to know and do. The word
“understand” is not appropriate to use in an objective because it is not observable
or measurable. The objective for the lesson plan would be better if the author
said “define” or “explain” the grievances of the colonists. If the author used
these two terms, when looking at Bloom’s taxonomy, the students will be
partaking in the comprehension stage. This means that the objective’s goal is
to have the students be able to grasp the meaning of certain material by
interpreting or extrapolating information. In this case, the students will be able
to use what they learned from the activity towards the reading in the textbook.
They can at first try to comprehend what happened during the activity as well
as try to interpret the importance of why they had to come up with their own
grievances. Once they have figured that out, they can read about the grievances
of the American Colonists and explain how their grievances links to the
historical information they read.

To conclude, the lesson plan incorporates good collaborative
learning that can keep learners engaged within the classroom. This can help
students become more willing to participate, help them make better
associations, and can help with the variety of learning styles that are found
in a classroom setting. However, as mentioned earlier, what would make this
lesson even better is if the directions were not so vague and if the objective
was more accurate in stating what exactly the students should be able to know
and do. Overall, as a history major, I feel that this activity would be fun to
encompass inside the classroom. It was a well-depicted lesson plan that can
have an impact on student’s knowledge on why the American colonists wanted America
to become autonomous.